I guess congratulations are in order for Nolan managing to unite high-brow male critics and very annoying people on Twitter under a common bromance, but to me, Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness—which apparently they don’t get to do enough.

Yes. Can confirm; saw the movie at the weekend: the film really does celebrate maleness.

It celebrates the kind of maleness which – contra Marie Claire‘s movie critic Mehera Bonner – we hear all too little of these days in this feminised, unpatriotic, self-hating age when papers like the Guardian think the time is now ripe to publish essays like this:

Dunkirk is a great movie but there aren’t enough “women” or “people of color” in it, according to a review in USA Today.
The movie – with a cast including Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, and former One Direction singer Harry Styles – has been given a slew of five-star reviews for its vivid, nail-biting depiction of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in 1940.

But though USA Today’s reviewer praised it too, he couldn’t resist giving it a little rap on the knuckles about its shameful lack of diversity and equality:

The trio of timelines can be jarring as you figure out how they all fit, and the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way.

Yes, it’s true that Dunkirk’s leading roles are indeed dominated by white European males.

But one possible reason for this is that Dunkirk was an actual historical event which director Christopher Nolan has gone to considerable trouble to recreate as accurately as possible.